Norman Spinrad managed to bug just about everybody with BugJack Barron (1969). The book got attacked in Parliament. TheDaily Express branded it as filth. Book and magazine retailerMenzies removed it from its racks, and even phoned up its competitorWH Smith and convinced them to do the same. Even before it hadbeen released, the publisher commissioning the novel refused toissue it. The work was then accepted by Michael Moorcock forpublication in his magazine New Worlds, but the feminist printerswho typeset for the periodical also mounteda protest against Spinrad’s text.

And how does the novel hold up almost a half-century later? Has it mellowed with age?

No, not a bit.

You still couldn't assign this book in a classroomwithout stirring up a wave of protest and discontent. Many would object to the racial epithets, which comeat the reader strong and hard in the first paragraph,and keep on coming for the duration of the novel. Others would seek out and find, without much difficulty,examples of sexism, obscenity, blasphemy, vulgarity,glorification of drug use, ridicule of authority figures,and the cynical advocacy of a range of unpopularpolitical ideologies. In short, whether you are on theRight or Left, progressive or reactionary, Red Stateor Blue State, believer or atheist or agnostic…whatever floats your boat, Spinrad just gave you aleak and you’re taking water fast.

In his own prickly and cussed way, Spinrad has ensured that his mostfamous book will languish in obscurity, neglected by most and attackedby a few. In a way, that's sad. Spinrad brilliantly anticipated many aspectsof 21st century culture, and few science fiction works from the 1960s stillcontain so many relevant and thought-provoking insights on the dangerousintersection of mass media, technology and politics in the current day. Ifyou are willing to have your sensibilities tweaked, and sometimes stompedon—and, I assure you, that will happen repeatedly in this book—you willget some compensation from the smart, provocative things Spinrad hasto say about talk radio, social networking, cable TV and the worldwide web.

Well, let me be honest, he doesn't actually mention any of those platformsin Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad got many of the details wrong, but heunderstood the Big Picture, conceiving how the medium massagesthe message, or sometimes just beats it into submission. He sawhow reality would turn virtual, how media would become interactive,how politics would get engulfed by images on screens and showbizpriorities. Above all, he anticipated the angry, in-your-face tone of modernday ideological rhetoric. Even back in the days of Walter Cronkite,Spinrad saw the more hardball, partisan style of ratings-driven commentarythat now follows us wherever we go—surfing the web, listen to the radioin our car, watching the big screen TV in our living room of the smallerone on our handheld device.

Jack Barron, our hero of sorts, is the star of a hit TV interactive talk showthat attracts 100 million viewers every Wednesday night. He is BillO’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh all rolled intoone, a brash talking head who combines pushing-the-envelope commentarywith populist rhetoric and showbiz theatrics. Viewers are invited to "bugJack Barron" with whatever is bugging them. They are connected in realtime with the host and home audience via a video-phone, and share theirgripes and rants. Then Jack Barron takes their grievances and runs withthem—calling up powerful people and putting them on the vid-screen,forcing them to answer tough questions about the issue du jour.

At the start of the novel, the hot issue is cold, very cold. A large nonprofitis charging wealthy people a half million dollars to be frozen when they 'die',get warehoused in cold storage, and resurrected at some future date,when an immortality cure is made available. The head of the nonprofit,wealthy and corrupt Benedict Howards, is using his political clout to gethis freezer operation turned into a government-approved monopoly. Arival movement wants freezing turned into an entitlement, offered free toall.

Jack Barron is thrust into the center of this ideological warfare. Howardswants to bribe him, while various political operatives want to enlist the talkshow host into opposing the wealthy freezer magnate's scheme. ButBarron must also worry about a host of other interests and risks. The FCCmight shut down his TV show. His hard-hitting investigation into thefreezer controversy also leaves him open to libel suits. Old friends wantnew favors and, adding to the complication, the love of his life SaraWesterfeld has shown up after years of separation…and she is secretlyin cahoots with Benedict Howards.

This story is compelling and, despite a few implausible plot twists, getsmore interesting as the novel develops. But Spinrad is often his ownworst enemy, loading down his tale with bloated and repetitive stream-of-consciousness interludes. Whenever these arrive, they are jarring, andsoon they become predictable and tiresome. Perhaps if Spinradpossessed the knack for wordplay of a Joyce, or the prose style of aWoolf, or the cleverness of a Nabokov, he could have pulled this off.But he flounders instead, tossing off the same phrases and referencesover and over again. Jack Barron, celebrity TV star, ought to be anexciting protagonist for a stream-of-consciousness novel, but by the time Spinrad is done with him, Leopold Bloom looks like Mr. Excitement by comparison. Even more to the point, this technique is out-of-keepingwith the rest of the novel, which is distinguished by crisp dialogue andforceful, no-nonsense characters engaged in mano a mano politicalintrigue. It's almost as if Spinrad hadn't decided whether he wanted towrite a dreamy and poetic experimental novel, or a hard-boiled futuristicthriller, and compromised by mixing up both styles. The result is astrange hybrid, a kind of warm and fuzzy cyberpunk, cooing andstrident by turns.

So, yes, you have many reasons to keep away from this novel. It willprobably offend you repeatedly, and if you do persist in reading it, itwill make unreasonable demands, frustrating even the most patientreader. Despite these shortcomings, you still might want to makethe plunge. A book so willing to upset you is also likely to provoke youinto new ways of thinking. Even more to the point: there are plenty ofJack Barrons out there today, in fact more now than ever before. Perhaps exposure to this kind of virulence in the form of a novel—bloated, disturbing, cantankerous by turns—will help you build up animmunity when you encounter it on a screen, small or large. And youwill, I assure you, you will.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and pop culture. His next book, a history of lovesongs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.